Spring Data Rest - sort by nested property

Question

I have a database service using Spring Boot 1.5.1 and Spring Data Rest. I am storing my entities in a MySQL database, and accessing them over REST using Spring\'s PagingAndS

Answer 1

From Spring Data REST documentation:

Sorting by linkable associations (that is, links to top-level resources) is not supported.

https://docs.spring.io/spring-data/rest/docs/current/reference/html/#paging-and-sorting.sorting

An alternative that I found was use @ResResource(exported=false). This is not valid (expecially for legacy Spring Data REST projects) because avoid that the resource/entity will be loaded HTTP links:

JacksonBinder
BeanDeserializerBuilder updateBuilder throws
 com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.exc.MismatchedInputException: Cannot construct instance of ' com...' no String-argument constructor/factory method to deserialize from String value

I tried activate sort by linkable associations with help of annotations but without success because we need always need override the mappPropertyPath method of JacksonMappingAwareSortTranslator.SortTranslator detect the annotation:

            if (associations.isLinkableAssociation(persistentProperty)) {
                if(!persistentProperty.isAnnotationPresent(SortByLinkableAssociation.class)) {
                    return Collections.emptyList();
                }
            }

Annotation

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target(ElementType.FIELD)
public @interface SortByLinkableAssociation {
}

At project mark association as @SortByLinkableAssociation:

@ManyToOne
@SortByLinkableAssociation
private Name name;

Really I didn't find a clear and success solution to this issue but decide to expose it to let think about it or even Spring team take in consideration to include at nexts releases.